in many other respects; still, in the right to put into his mouth the bread that his own hands have earned he is the equal of every other man, white or black. In pointing out that more has been given you, you cannot be justified in taking away the little which has been given him. All I ask for the negro is that, if you do not like him, you let him alone. If God gave him but little, that little let him enjoy.

ence.

When our government was established we had the institution of slavery among us.1 We were in a certain sense compelled to tolerate its existence. It was a sort of necessity. We had gone through our struggle and secured our own independThe framers of the Constitution found the institution of slavery amongst their other institutions at the time. They found that by an effort to eradicate it they might lose much of what they had already gained. They were obliged to bow to the necessity. They gave power to Congress to abolish the slave-trade at the end of twenty years. They also prohibited it in the Territories where it did not exist. They did what they could, and yielded to necessity for the rest. I also yield to all which follows from this necessity. What I would most desire would be the separation of the white and black races.

Henry Clay once said of a class of men who would repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation, that they must, if they would do this, go back to the era of our independence and muzzle the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return; they must blow out the moral lights around us; they must penetrate the human soul and eradicate there the love of liberty; and then, and not until then, could they perpetuate slavery in this country! To my thinking, Judge Douglas is, by his example and vast influence, doing that very thing in this community when he says that the negro has nothing in the Declaration of Independence. Henry Clay plainly understood the contrary. Judge Douglas is going back to the era of our

1. When was slavery first introduced into America? What causes tended to develop it in the South?

2. Why?

3. Does this prohibition occur in the Constitution? If not, where is it found!

4. What is the significance of this statement ?

Revolution, and to the extent of his ability muzzling the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return.

When he invites any people, willing to have slavery, to establish it, he is blowing out, the moral lights around us. When he says he cares not whether slavery is voted up or voted down "—that it is a sacred right of self-government-he is in my judgment penetrating the human soul, and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty in this American people. And now I will only say that when, by all these means and appliances, Judge Douglas shall succeed in bringing public sentiment to an exact accordance with his own views-when these vast assemblages shall echo back all these sentimentsthen it needs only the formality of the second Dred Scott decision,' which he indorses in advance, to make slavery alike lawful in all the States-old as well as new, North as well as South.

That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles-right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other is the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, "You work and toil and earn bread, and I will eat it." No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.

The Cooper Institute Speech

After his debates with Mr. Douglas the attention of the country was attracted towards Mr. Lincoln. The people of the East desired to see and hear the man who had vanquished the most

1. What was this famous decision?

shrewd debater and the most skillful and adroit politician in Congress. Therefore an invitation was extended to him to give a political address in New York on the 27th of February, 1859, which he accepted. He was introduced to the audience by the illustrious poet William Cullen Bryant, and was greeted by an audience which taxed the capacity of the great hall to the utter

most.

The address was in the main historical, tracing in a masterly manner the political history of the country in its relation to slavery, and discussing the great questions at issue in a fair and friendly spirit. It was afterwards published in pamphlet form, with the following introductory statement by the publishers:

"No one who has not actually attempted to verify its details can understand the patient research and the historical labor which it embodies. The history of our earlier politics is scattered through numerous journals, statutes, pamphlets, and letters; and these are defective in completeness and accuracy of statement, and in indexes and tables of contents. Neither can any one who has not traveled over this precise ground appreciate the accuracy of every trivial detail, or the self-denying impartiality with which Mr. Lincoln has turned from the testimony of the fathers' on the general question of slavery to present the single question which he discusses. From the first line to the last, from his premises to his conclusion, he travels with a swift unerring directness which no logician ever excelled. . . . A single easy simple sentence of plain Anglo-Saxon words contains a chapter of history that, in some instances, must have taken days of labor to verify, and must have cost the author months of investigation to acquire."

In this address he formulated the doctrines which were destined to be incorporated into the platform of the Republican party. He said :

A few words now to Republicans: It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great Confederacy shall be at peace and in harmony one with another. Let us Republicans do our part to have it so. Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill-temper. Even though the Southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly

consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can.

Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored-contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man, such as a policy of "don't care " on a question about which all true men do care,-such as Union appeals, beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule and calling not the sinners but the righteous to repentance, such as invocations of Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington did. Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith let us, to the end, dare to do our duty, as we understand it.'

The Presidential Campaign

The Republican nominating convention was held in Chicago in an immense building called the "Wigwam," May 16, 1860. Delegates were present from all the Free States, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, and Virginia, but the Gulf States were not represented. The leading candidates for the nomination were William H. Seward, of New York; Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois; Salmon P. Chase, of Ohio; Simon Cameron, of Pennsylvania; and Edward Bates, of Missouri. But it was soon evident that the contest would be between Seward and Lincoln.

1. What was the condition of the South at the time this address was delivered ?

On the first ballot Seward received 173 votes to 102 for Lincoln. On the second ballot Seward received 184, and Lincoln 181. On the third ballot Lincoln received a majority, and his nomination was made unanimous.

This nomination was received with intense enthusiasm, not only in Chicago and Illinois, but throughout the Northwest. Arnold, in his "Life of Lincoln," says:

"This Presidential campaign has had no parallel. The enthusiasm of the people was like a great conflagration, like a prairie fire before a wild tornado. A little more than twenty years had passed since Orrin Lovejoy, brother of Elijah Lovejoy,' on the bank of the Mississippi, kneeling on the turf not then green over the grave of the brother who had been killed for his fidelity to freedom, had sworn eternal war against slavery.

"From that time on, he and his associate abolitionists had gone forth preaching their crusade against oppression, with hearts of fire and tongues of lightning, and now the consummation was to be realized of a President elected on the distinct ground of opposition to the extension of slavery. For years the hatred of that institution had been growing and gathering force. Whittier, Bryant, Lowell, Longfellow, and others had written the lyrics of liberty; the graphic pen of Mrs. Stowe in Uncle Tom's Cabin' had painted the cruelties of the overseer and slaveholder, but the acts of the slaveholders themselves did more to promote the growth of antislavery than all other causes.

"The persecutions of the abolitionists in the South; the harshness and cruelty attending the execution of the fugitive-slave laws; the brutality of Brooks in knocking down, on the floor of the Senate, Charles Sumner, for words spoken in debate,-these and many other outrages had fired the hearts of the people of the Free States against this barbarous institution.

Beecher, Phillips, Channing, Sumner, and Seward with their eloquence; Chase with his logic; Lincoln with his appeals to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and to the opinions of the founders of the Republic, his clear statements, his apt illustrations; above all, his wise moderation-all had swelled the voice of the people, which found expression through the ballot-box, and

1. Elijah Lovejoy was shot by a mob at Alton on account of his abolition sentiments.